Chapter Two
Seth made coffee for two in the morning. Eirika made breakfast, if toasting bread and arranging a few pieces of fruit atop yoghurt truly counted as making breakfast. She'd cooked eggs and bacon many mornings for Ephraim, but Seth wasn't Ephraim and so he didn't get poached eggs atop his toast with three strips of bacon alongside.
He might not have been Ephraim, but Eirika was used to Seth's presence at breakfast now. She'd gotten accustomed already to the way he stirred the cream into her coffee- first clockwise, then counter-clockwise, so the liquid in her cup was a perfect even burnt-sugar color with no swirls of cream floating on top. The words "military precision" popped into her mind, but Eirika knew that couldn't be it, not when her father had liked his coffee unevenly stirred, to the point where she'd joked with him about it, saying they could read the future in the swirls in his coffee the way fortune-tellers did with tea leaves...
Eirika blinked and brought the cup to her lips.
"What was the name of the woman who sent over the gift basket?" she asked Seth. "Was it Tita or Deirdre? I need to send her a thank-you note."
She was usually better than this.
"Deirdre. She's the wife of the village manager."
Eirika nodded and did her best to commit that to memory. If she learned Arcadia Springs, if she enveloped herself in details of setting and character, it might be easier to play the role of Erina Waite. Right now, with her part not truly learned, she didn't even want to go outside.
But she'd have to go outside. If Erina Waite never left the home, there'd be talk, and the last thing she needed right now was for the people of Arcadia Springs to start talking about the newcomers.
Seth's commute lasted an hour in the morning, and sometimes two hours coming home in the afternoon, which left Eirika to her own devices a good part of the day. She was, allegedly, writing a book on the history of artificial lighting and its social and political impact on the world, and she'd been given a stack of resources to use for this project. Eirika had no great interest in the topic, but this was the task she'd been given, and if it wasn't as grave a duty as, say, Seth's own order to protect "Erina Waite," it was hers nonetheless, and so Eirika mustered that sense of duty into the willpower needed to take a handful of books onto the sunporch and read up on the development of the paraffin lamp.
Eirika plowed through the material until the children who lived in the house with the rose garden came home from their lessons. There were three of them, two girls and a boy, all of the age for middle school. Eirika wondered if any of the three might be twins... and if so, which. This question burned within her for reasons she couldn't say, and so she let her attentions fall away from her "research" and watched the trio of children kick a ball around the quiet pavement of Sofia Court.
She couldn't determine if any of them were twins, and this disappointed her more than such a trivial detail ought to. The dark-haired girl struck Eirika as older than the blonde-haired girl, but the boy might have been a twin to either sister, and then again, none of the children looked much like one another. She knew nothing about the family in the house with the rose garden, really, save that children's mother was one of the two police officers in Arcadia Springs, and that their father left the house a few minutes before Seth each morning and usually returned just before Seth pulled into the driveway.
Thinking of this made Eirika wonder if the two men shared the same commute or even worked in the same building. That, in turn, made her wonder what it all meant if they did. Perhaps the brown-haired boy chasing a ball down the street was a "twin" to his sister in the same way that Erina Waite was the loving wife of Seth.
The strangeness of her life must already have shaped her view of the world. This family in the house with the yard full of white roses seemed perfectly nice and it was silly of Eirika to suspect them of anything. Eirika collected her books and papers and went into the house to make dinner.
To Be Continued...
A/N: My, but it's been a while...